MM#288---The Unreasonable Person - 80/20 Style

Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, David Kaiser.

Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo Minute, as is our custom. Let's jump right into our first pull quote. The 80-20 principle can and should be used by every intelligent person in their daily life, by every organization, by every social grouping and form of society. It can help individuals and groups achieve more with much less effort. The 80-20 principle can raise personal effectiveness and happiness. It can multiply the profitability of corporations and the effectiveness of any organization. It even holds the key to raising the quality and quantity of public services while cutting their cost. This book, the first ever on the 80-20 principle, is written from a burning conviction, validated in personal and business expertise and experience, that this principle is one of the best ways of dealing with and transcending the pressures of modern life. And that, my friends, is the opening quote for this Mojo Minute from the book the 80-20 principle, the third edition, the Secret to Achieving More with Less by Richard Koch, and if there doesn't need to be any more of a heavier endorsement, a higher endorsement. This Timothy Ferris says that the 80-20 principle is the cornerstone of results-based living. He says read this book and use it Now. This newest edition just came out, in 2022. It now has four new chapters. The book originally came out in 1999. For those that do not know, and we are going to continue on with Another quote in Socratic form, we're going to ask the question to what is the 80 20 principle? The 80 20 principle asserts that a minority of causes, inputs or effort usually lead to a majority of the results, outputs or Rewards. Taken literally, this means that, for example, 80% of what you achieve in your job comes from 20% of the time spent. Thus, for practical purposes, for fifths of the effort, a dominant part of it is largely irrelevant. This is contrary to what most people. I'm sorry, this is contrary to what people normally expect. So the 80 20 principle states that there is an inbuilt imbalance between causes and results, inputs and outputs in effort and reward. A good benchmark for this imbalance is provided by the 80 20 relationship. A Typical pattern will show that 80% of the outputs result from 20% of inputs, that 80% of consequences flow from 20% of causes and that 80% of results come from 20% of effort and Business. Many examples of the 80 20 principle can be validated and have been 20% of products usually account for 80% of dollar sales value. So do 20% of customers. 20% of products or customers Usually account for about 80% of an organization's profits. In Society, 20% of criminals account for 80% of the value of all crime. 20% of motorists Cause 80% of accidents. 20% of those who marry comprise 80% of the divorce statistics. Those who consistently remarry and redevore distort the statistics and give a lopsided, pessimistic impression of the extent of marital fidelity. 20% of children attain 80% of the educational qualifications available in the home. 20% of your carpets are likely to get 80% of the wear. 20% of your clothes will be Worn 80% of the time. And if you have an intruder alarm, 80% of the false alarms will be set off by 20% of the possible causes. The internal combustion engine is a great tribute to the 80 20 principle. 80% of the energy is wasted in combustion and only 20% gets to the wheels, and this 20% of input generates a hundred percent of the output. Now you might have thought I was going to go on and on and on About the 80 20 examples or the 20 80 examples, however you want to coin the term. But I did not. So the reason I brought up the 80 20 principle number one was I thought it's a great negative wisdom to share with you. But also I was thinking about last week's mojo minute, where I talked about exercise being the number one thing that most people focus on in terms of losing weight and how, as I reflected back on this past year, how, from February largely the beginning of February and till April, I had lost some 12 pounds and I had not changed my exercise at all. I Was simply walking my Anywhere, from two to three miles a day. That I normally have been doing for the last five, six, seven, eight years, and that comes on the cusp of when I was super in shape, like I talked about in Last week's mojo minute. So that got me going down the rabbit trail, and the end of that rabbit trail is this book, the 80 20 principle, and I thought about it for a long time because it made sense that 80% of my weight loss would come from 20% of my cutting of calories and that gets into the energy principle of calories and calories out, which probably is not actually true. We'll delve into that in another Mojo Minute. But to keep things simple and to keep things effective for weight loss, most of us don't require a lot of calorie cutting to achieve weight loss. It's simply an 80-20 principle. We merely need to reduce our calories and be consistent about it by somewhere of 500 maybe, or maybe 750 calories at the very highest. That's not a lot of calories. When you actually food log and look at what you're actually putting in your mouth and I should know, because I have food logged in the past and I am food logging now and the wonderful revelation is, when you actually look at what you put in your mouth and you're honest with yourself, you very easily identify 700, 500 to 750 calories. It's amazing. They're just right there in front of you every day and you're thinking, wow, I should not eat that because that's going to contribute to my over-calorie consumption. And if you cut 500 calories per day over seven days, that's 3,500 calories. Guess what? How many calories are in a pound? Actually, there's 3,500 calories in one pound If you keep the mass simple, and that is what our country is lacking. We don't keep things simple. Everything has to have a nuance to it. There's no longer right and wrong, there's no longer black and white, there's no longer truth. A calorie is based on energy. 3,500 calories is one pound based on energy and how energy is burned, without all the other qualifiers, without other the tangential arguments. Everything else that's figured into that. Let's just keep it simple. How many calories equals a pound? 3,500. So if you merely cut 500 calories out of your diet each and every day and you're consistent about it which I have not been, admittedly, but you are consistent about it then over the course of a week, all things being constant, you can for the most part possibly lose one pound. Now that's not to say that there is other factors. Certainly there is. Exercise does play a part, but exercise certainly is not 50-50. In actuality, getting back to the 80-20 principle, my own personal opinion is 80% of weight loss is food and 20% is exercise. Now some will make the argument it's 60-40 exercise to or food to exercise. Some will say 75-25. The more I live, the more I think it is 80-20. If you think about it, you can only exercise anywhere from, at the most, at the absolute most, four to five to possibly six hours without just pure exhaustion. Most of us only work out for anywhere from a half hour to an hour and a half. That leaves another 23 to 22 to 21 hours left in the day. Hopefully you're spending about six hours, seven hours, eight hours of your time there sleeping. So that leaves a vast majority of the time where you're going to be putting food in your mouth. So when you split that up, the 80-20 principle gets very close to being validated. That all being said, let's come back to the book and learn just one more quote about the 80-20 principle. Why does the 80-20 principle bring us good news, richard Koch tells us. I want to end this introduction on a personal rather than a procedural note. I believe the 80-20 principle is enormously helpful. Certainly, the principle brings home what may be evident anyway that there is a tragic amount of waste everywhere, in the way that nature operates, in business, in society and in our own lives. If the typical pattern is for 80% of results to come from 20% of inputs, it is necessarily typical too that 80% the great majority of inputs are having only a marginal 20% impact. The paradox is that such waste can be wonderful news If we use the 80-20 principle creatively, not just to identify and castigate low productivity, but to do something positive about it. There's an enormous scope for improvement by rearranging and redirecting both nature and our own lives. Improving on nature, refusing to accept the status quo, is the route of all progress Evolutionary, scientific, social and personal. George Bernard Shaw put it well, the reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. So in today's Mojo Minute, do just that Be the unreasonable person. Be the person that looks at their life and says if I'm to get 80% of my results from 20% of my inputs, then I'm going to drastically refine my life to figure out how to flourish better. And then be unreasonable with yourself. As George Bernard Shaw told us, the reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. Go out and be unreasonable, and a little PS here. You could be unreasonable with what we talked about earlier with weight loss. Just cut 20% of your calories roughly about 500 calories for each of us. If you do that in your consistent, I bet you get 80% results. Imagine that the 80-20 principle works.